FICTION

MAMA MAKES UP HER MIND and Other Dangers of Southern Living by Bailey White (Addison-Wesley: $17.95; 240 pp.) Bailey White’s stories about life in south Georgia have become a regular feature of “All Things Considered” on National Public Radio. This collection translates 54 of them--many quite short--from the broadcast voice to the printed page. White’s world is both familiar and strange. She keeps one foot sunk in the swamp of Southern literary tradition and the other waving airily in a space all her own. We hear about alligators and hurricanes and Fundamentalists and her mother’s eccentricities--in these stories, as in real life, White lives with “Mama” and teaches first grade--but we also hear about Benny Goodman and Porsches and the sinking of the Titanic and imaginary chicken feet. Race and sex, those staples of Dixie writing, are touched on, but just barely.

Most of the stories are warm and amusing throwaways, notable only for the understated skill with which White tells them. Occasionally, though, a deeper note intrudes. An ill-tempered aunt goes mad and rages at her image in mirrors (“You bad, mean old woman. Get out.”), but as months pass, the image grows younger, and when it’s only a little girl looking back at her, she finally can speak gently to herself. White, in her classroom, reads a century-old French book about Joan of Arc and finds its patriotic exhortations charming until she realizes: “French children 6 years old, reading that book when it was new, would have been just military age in 1914.”